La Trobe loop. Felt reasonably strong this morning, although having a light tail wind in the uphill sections helped. Not a lot of people around as you'd expect on a de facto holiday.
I'm taking the couple of days I might have spent at the 5-days to do some more exploring within Victoria. This took me to the likes of back roads between Alexandra and Lake Eildon, and Mount Buller, which I haven't previously been to. There wasn't a lot of serenity on display at Bonnie Doon thanks to the presence of large numbers of speedboats (the fact that probably about a kilometre of foreshore is taken up by the campground of the Melbourne Outboard Club suggests that this is not an especially uncommon occurrence), and there certainly wasn't in the hectic main street of Mansfield, but the views from the Mount Buller summit and areas nearby were nice. (The hamstring felt it a bit coming down off the summit).
(The first bit of hecticness I encountered was being in a long convoy of vehicles heading for Yarra Glen, which turned out to be mostly heading for the races. The Yarra Glen races are something I associate chiefly with one of the best newspaper corrections I've seen, when the Age some years ago said "We incorrectly reported that at the Yarra Glen races, (trainer name) referred to the stewards as "imbeciles". In fact, he called them "numbskulls").
My route also took me onto two roads signposted "4WD only" which were nothing of the sort. The first was a narrow and winding but otherwise perfectly normal dirt road (I can only assume the council were trying to discourage people from using it as a short cut to Lake Eildon; not sure if anyone's tried to
turn a team of bullocks on it recently), the second was the track from Mount Buller across to the Mount Stirling circuit, which was a bit rocky in spots but nothing most people here haven't seen on the access track to an event assembly area.